This invention relates in general to the control of insects, and in particular to the attracting of harmful insects such as mosquitoes, black flies, sand flies and the like for purposes of monitoring, capturing, or killing them.
The need for insect control is well established and is probably best exemplified by the history of mosquito control. In the 19th-century Dr. Donald Ross of the British Army in India proved that malaria is spread by mosquitoes. At the turn of the century, the work of Dr. Walter Reed on controlling yellow fever during construction of the Panama Canal became famous. Since that time, despite intensive efforts by public health authorities everywhere, elimination of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases has not been possible, largely because of the difficulty of eliminating mosquitoes. Now the world is faced with frightening outbreaks of incurable or newly drug-resistant mosquito-borne diseases, underlining the need for effective mosquito control measures, including means to capture, monitor, or destroy active adult individual specimens.
It is not only in the suppression of disease that controls are needed. There is the perennial call for abatement of the nuisance of mosquito and black fly bites, which make unprotected outdoor activities all but impossible at certain seasons of the year in many parts of the world.
Since mosquitoes and biting flies appear in vast numbers over wide areas, and readily evade any physical means of killing them, hunting them down individually or collecting them by simple mechanical means is not practical. With regard to mosquitoes, currently effective methods of control can only attack the population as a whole by chemical or bacterial means, or seek to remove their breeding sites. These methods are cumbersome, labor-intensive, and often politically disruptive, in that they may introduce dangerous amounts of toxic chemicals into the environment, kill harmless or beneficial creatures and destroy wetlands. At best they are only palliative in nature.
Some attempts have been made to isolate and refine the elements serving to attract various animals, including insects, in order to construct traps. In particular, for trapping mosquitoes, light, color-contrast, warmth, carbon dioxide, octenol, water vapor, lactic acid, sound, and several more complex organic chemicals have been used as attractants.
Thus, traps exist, but traps currently in use require maintenance and resupply of consumables, and can be inhumane where live animals or persons are used as bait. Worse, they do not work very well. Certain traps are useful for monitoring mosquito populations and trapping live individuals for scientific purposes such as making virus assays, but the presently available traps, being usable only at certain times of days or seasons of the year, and then only on certain species of mosquito, are not themselves suitable for control purposes. Some of the control methods and traps in current use have the further disadvantage of killing large numbers of harmless and beneficial insects with resulting damage to the food chain.
In addition to the large-scale control measures in which attractant-based traps are legitimately used for guidance and monitoring, there has been no shortage of consumer bug control devices promoted for killing or repelling mosquitoes. These include bug "zappers", scented candles, floor washes, yellow light bulbs, vacuum and suction mechanical devices, electronic sound generators, wingbeat buzzers, etc. All these items are not really effective in practical terms, but continue to be sold on the unfulfilled promise that they will accomplish some good. Some, such as blue-light bug "zappers" kill hundreds of harmless or beneficial insects for every mosquito killed, and hence may actually do harm.
Unlike prior art devices, the present invention provides a solution useful in large-scale and research operations for disease control as well as in domestic and personal areas in the form of an inexpensive and effective device to concentrate and gather up mosquitoes and black flies for purposes of study, capture, nuisance-abatement, or extermination. In comparative trials, the present invention has been shown to be capable of attracting multiple species of mosquito at rates at least an order of magnitude better than standard traps, with only minimal hazard to harmless and beneficial insects. The devices of the present invention have also been shown to attract insects preferentially in sufficient numbers to create a zone of protection for people or animals in the vicinity.